In
his The Achievement of C. S. Lewis (1980), Thomas Howard reflects
that Lewis's life was "not terribly exciting," and adds, "[i]t
would be hard to make a big box-office film of it."1Hard - yes.Impossible - no.Thirteen years after Howard's statement and thirty years after
Lewis's death, Richard Attenborough brought Lewis's life to the big
screen. Philip Yancey notes that "[s]ome evangelicals complain that
the movie distorts Lewis's life and waters down his Christian
message."2I contend that even the most fundamental evangelical should have
no complaints and that the highly religious film deserves another look.

Article

[1]
In Shadowlands (1993), director Richard Attenborough exquisitely
uses film techniques to present an ever-so-accurate presentation of
Lewis, the man of books, and of his philosophy, his "mere"
Christianity.

[2]
First,
how does Attenborough's
film biography portray C. S. Lewis?Linda Seger, author of The Art of Adaptation, advises
anyone attempting a biographical film to remember that"it is impossible to tell a 'Womb to tomb'
story in two hours."3Thus, Attenborough's
decision to stick with screenwriter Nicholson's
portrayal of only a few short years in Lewis's
life was a wise one. Basically,
the time under consideration is a two-to-three year telescoped
period in the early 1950s focusing on Lewis's
falling-in-love-with-Joy experience. The telescoped "facts"
revealed in the film are on track: Attenborough's
C. S. Lewis (Anthony Hopkins) is a late middle-aged professor, a writer
of children's stories,
and an author of Christian apologetic works. He is a bachelor living with an alcoholic elder brother in an old
country home (The Kilns). Three
of the most important aspects of C. S. Lewis are foregrounded: the film
portrays Lewis as a brilliant debater, as a beloved public figure, and
as an emotionally isolated man. Attenborough
does, indeed, capture the essence of the man. However, of greater
significance to the film's
worth is Attenborough's
ability to adapt Lewis's
philosophy, his Christian theism. Lewis
himself defined his "mere"
Christianity as "the belief that has been common to nearly all
Christians at all times."4He
was not interested in divisive doctrines, describing his The Case for
Christianity as "more
what might be called philosophy" and defining philosophy as did Plato - not as a subject but as a way.5However, Attenborough's
film illustrates that Lewis's way was less easily traveled than the
scholar had - for twenty-five years - proclaimed.

[3]
To
Attenborough's credit he
covers all of the ever-so-big issues Lewis addresses in his writings:
death, heaven, hell, pain, faith. The
film's question is: Do
C. S. Lewis's ready
answers suffice? The answer
is the film's story of life being driven to a deeper level of
experience.

[4]
The
obvious subject of concern in the film is death - not the Merle Oberon Wuthering
Heights mystical, romantic, beautiful death - but the morphined,
agonizing, suffering real death of a real person: Joy Gresham Lewis. Joy credits her acceptance of Christianity with sustaining her
through years of marriage to a philandering alcoholic husband. Attenborough's
Joy's admission to Lewis
that her showing up on his doorstep was a "running
away" from problems at home was true-to-life. She later said: "I was so much under Bill's
influence that I had to run away from him physically and consult one of
the clearest thinkers of our time."6She did consult Lewis, inviting him to the now-famous luncheon
portrayed in the film, and the rest, as they say, is history. In the film, shortly after a "technical" marriage, Attenborough shows Joy suddenly falling down in her
apartment. Doctors diagnose
cancer. Jack faces the
truth; he is in love with this sick woman. Joy's cancer goes
into remission. A happy
period follows, but the shadow of her illness grows ever longer. The cancer, again active, consumes her body. She suffers. She
dies.

[5]
Jack's
grief was intense. His "faith - so
ardently championed in his books - was shaken to its very foundation."7Attenborough's film visually captures this dark period of doubt and bitterness. The suspense builds as the viewer wonders if Lewis can continue
to regard death as a simple river-crossing on a bridge built by the
great Bridge Builder. Shortly
after Joy's death, Jack
attends a social gathering. Everyone
turns as Jack enters the room, quietly whispering, one by one, "so
sorry, Jack," "so very sorry." Harry Harrington (Michael Denison) reminds him that "we see so
little here." Faith, he points out, is all that sustains one. "Only God," he says,
"knows why these things
happen." Jack turns on him with a vengeance, angrily shouting: "We're
the creatures in the cosmic laboratory. I have no doubt the experience is for our own good, but it still
makes God the villainous vivisectionist!" The film lays out the harsh reality of death.

[6]
The
reality of heaven, too, is certainly explored and affirmed. Indeed, Attenborough pays great attention to Lewis's
belief in the reality of heaven. When
Jack voices his anger at Riley's
suggestion that the Narnia wardrobe is a Freudian sexual image,
insisting instead that it is a symbol of magic, he implies much. The Lewis scholar, Thomas Howard, argues that Lewis's greatest achievement was his attempt to return the modern child
to the possibilities of imaginative truth - to embrace fantasy,
imagination, and the supernatural and the possibilities of glories and
the glorious.8Lewis was convinced that the myths of all cultures shed some
light on the "one myth
that really happened."9 Thus, the Narnia wardrobe that the children in the stories must
open, enter, and push through in order to magically enter another world
is but a metaphor for the courage to leave the land of the material and
open the door to the possibilities of the metaphysical.

[7]
However,
the greatest illustration in the film of Lewis's thoughts regarding heaven is given via the Golden Valley
picture. As Joy enters
Lewis's masculine study
surrounded by books, she stops and stares at a picture on the wall. Jack tells her that when he was a very little boy it hung in
his nursery and that he thought it was a picture of heaven. Later, after the "marriage before God and the world" on Joy's hospital
sickbed and during her period of remission, Joy suggests taking a
holiday and locating the actual valley portrayed in the picture. When they arrive at the inn and ask the keeper for
directions, she informs them that the valley's
name was mistranslated. The
actual translation from the French should have been "door," not
"golden." They drive to the
place, get out of the car, and behold - before them lies the door to
Narnia! The English
countryside has never looked more radiant; golden shafts of sunshine
bathe a green, green meadow. A
perfect sky smiles down on Joy and Jack as they walk through the
pasture, holding hands and laughing over little intimate jokes. It very much is the Golden Valley of the picture; it appears to
be as mystical a place as the imagination can conjure. However, rain soon begins to fall, reminding all that "the old
Narnia" does sometimes provide a glimpse of heaven but clouds soon
appear, shadows soon fall. The "real country" - the new Narnia - heaven - can only be reached by opening death's
door. The film's
most blatant address of the issue of heaven occurs after Joy's death. Its
poignancy relies on effective understatement. Douglas asks his
stepfather: "Do you believe in heaven?" and Lewis firmly responds: "Yes,
I do."

[8]
Not
only heaven but hell, too, is addressed in the film. Joy is in the hospital daily taking cobalt treatments,
suffering from her fight with cancer. Jack, too, suffers - intensely. It is this intense suffering that wakens him to the realization
of how very much Joy matters to him. He puzzles over his feelings for Joy and says to himself: "How
could Joy be my wife? I'd have to
love her, wouldn't I? I'd have to care
more for her than for anyone else in this world. I'd have to
suffering the torments of the damned," and, through sobs and tears,
realizes that he is. His
state of grief over the possibility of separation from Joy is so intense
that he parallels it to his vision of hell - eternal separation
from the God of Love. Thus,
Attenborough's film makes it increasingly clear that the love that exists
between Jack and Joy mirrors the love that Lewis advocates between God
and humankind and that Jack's
separation from Joy mirrors his hell that is separation from the source
of all love.

[9]
"Something
must drive us out of our nursery into the world--we must grow up!"
becomes the film's C. S.
Lewis dictum. This
statement very much summarizes the plot of Attenborough's
story. The "something" that
drives Lewis out of his cloistered and safe world - his nursery - into the
real world of open spaces full of bright joys and dark shadows is love;
the something that forces the man to grow up is intense suffering and
tragic loss - pain. Attenborough illustrates this humanizing journey through
careful attention to Jack's
progressive relationship with Joy, his detached professor to human being
relationship with a student, his increasingly intimate relationship with
Douglas, and his maturing relationship with God.

[10]
Attenborough's
attention to Lewis's "faith journey" deserves further comment.For decades Jack Lewis had been voicing and writing words of
faith; the film does not neglect this issue.Lewis had habitually addressed even great losses with ready
answers. In one of the
lectures portrayed in the movie, he waves a newspaper at the audience. And begins:

Yesterday
I read a letter that referred to an event that took place almost a year
ago. That was the night a
number 1 bus drove into a column of young Royal Marine cadets in
Chatham, and killed twenty-four of them. You remember? The
letter asks some simple but fundamental questions. Where was God on that December night? Why didn't He stop
it? Isn't
God supposed to be good? Isn't
he supposed to love us? Does
God want us to suffer? What
if the answer to that question is yes. You see, I'm not sure that God particularly wants us to be happy.
He wants us to love and be loved. He wants us to grow up. I
suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he makes us the gift
of suffering. Or to put it another way, pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

[11]
Lewis
continues his discussion, reasoning that "we're
like blocks of stone, out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of His chisel, which hurt so much, are what makes us
perfect." Attenborough's
film suggests that Lewis's
God put the man and his philosophical claims to the test. What does a writer do when overcome by any emotion? He writes. Lewis's "Grief Observed," claims Ralph C. Wood, is "darker
than anything in Kafka or Sartre."10Lewis accuses God of being a Cosmic Sadist, an evil tyrant. Lewis later described the book as one "which ends in faith but
raises all the blackest doubts en route."11In the film, a drained Lewis, sitting behind his desk, voices his
Grief Observed thesis. He turns to his brother and admits: "I'm so terribly afraid. Of
never seeing her again. Of
thinking that suffering is just suffering after all. No cause. No
purpose. No pattern. No
sense. Just pain, in a
world of pain."

[12]
Some
Christian critics negatively assess Attenborough's
film's ending, suggesting
that it belittles the reality of Lewis's
re-established, re-strengthened, "metal toughened by fire," faith. I disagree. The final scene is, once again, Narnia-like in its imagery. A long shot reveals Lewis and Douglas walking through another
Golden Valley meadow. Richard
Dyer explains: " he
romance literally embodies the theology and, as suggested by the last
surging (music, camerawork, rolling green valley) shot, [Lewis's] love for God is enriched by his experience of love in the here
and now."12 Attenborough
leads into this final shot via bleedover. Lewis has previously been "interviewing" a new tutoree. He has been asking the boy probing questions, not delivering his
previous pat answers. He
asks the new student what he thinks of the notion that we read to know we are not alone. The lad thinks this through and begins voicing his opinion. Lewis goes to the classroom window and looks outside. Attenborough uses voice-over: Lewis queries, "Why
love if loving hurts so much? I
have no answers; only the
life I've lived. Twice I've
been given a choice: the boy chose safety; the man chooses suffering." The film in its entirety answers the "Why love" question. It proclaims that it 'tis
better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all; indeed,
pain and suffering is part of the living experience. As Joy puts it, "it's
part of the deal." To
further clarify, safety provides only that - safety. Accepting the risk of suffering, however, provides the
possibility of experiencing great joy. Furthermore, the film, and specifically Lewis's "I have no
answers" concluding statement reiterates the thinking of a previous
great intellect: "There lives more faith in honest doubt ... than in half
the creeds."13 Indeed, faith can only be faith in the absence of certainties.

[13]
As
he concludes A Grief Observed, Lewis muses: "The best is perhaps
what we understand least."14
Attenborough provides a perfect example of such. In the film, Lewis, who was troubled by the issue of prayer since
childhood, continually prays. When
Joy's cancer goes into remission, Reverend Harrington tells Jack,
"God
is answering your prayers." Jack
replies with fervor: "That's
not why I pray--I pray because I can't
help myself--the need flows out of me. It doesn't change
God; it changes me." Thus,
the film suggests that prayer, never understood by Jack, was still one
of the "best" things. Life,
the intellectual Lewis finally learns, is not to be fully understood. Shortly before his death, Lewis concluded an interview with these
thoughts:

The
world might stop in ten minutes; meanwhile, we are to go on doing our
duty. The great thing is to be found at one's post a child of God, living each day as if it were out last, but
planning as though our world might last a hundred years.15

[14]
Attenborough's
final portrayal of Lewis shows him practicing this advice. He is "at his post," taking care of Douglas, enjoying the Narnia
that sometimes resembles heaven, contemplating the mysteries of this
experience called life. The
camera dollies farther and farther back; a long shot reveals Douglas and
Lewis, arm-in-arm, walking toward a horizon of blue cloudless skies.

[15]
There
is yet one aspect of the film that must be addressed. The title. Never, I
dare say, has one author used one word quite so consistently throughout
his canon. Never, I dare say,
has one director managed to use shadows more philosophically. Attenborough opens his film with a long shot of a glorious sunrise;
however, the sky is not cloudless - "heaven"
is obstructed from clear view. The
clouds make shadows on the land below. The clouds become heavier, hanging somewhat ominously over an
impressive Oxford skyline. Attenborough
then cuts to a shot of shadowy, flickering candles as solemn, Latinate
choir music is heard as the Oxford chapel comes into focus. An astute viewer perceives that this is a land clouded by shadows
and that the light of knowledge is, at times, dim and uncertain. When Douglas visits the Lewises for the first time, he asks if he
might see their wardrobe. Douglas
enters the attic; a low-angle shot pans the piece of furniture, and the
wardrobe--the gateway to the magical other world described the Narnia
stories --casts a long shadow over the child. Thus, Attenborough communicates Lewis's
contention that each person must choose whether or not to journey through
the shadows of the mind and embrace the possibilities of the
imagination--the possibilities that lie beyond scientific reason. After Joy's
initial visit with Jack and Warnie, she boards the train leaving Oxford. She looks at the brothers through the window; they appear shadowy. In this scene, Attenborough ever so cleverly manages to use shadows
as a foreshadowing: Jack and Warnie are later left behind in the land of
shadows as Joy departs on yet another journey - a journey to the shadowless
land of heaven.

[16]
The
final chapter in Lewis's
Narnia books is entitled "Farewell to Shadowlands." The children have arrived in the "new Narnia," i.e., heaven. They have left the Shadowlands behind. Lewis's description
of this world as a land of shadows accurately describes his final thoughts
on Christian theism. This
world, he contends, provides rare glimpses of the perfection that awaits
the believer in the new, shadowless land. Human comprehension, too, is, at best "shadowy"; Lewis finally
concludes that there is much that lies beyond human reason - "uncertainty,"
he told Joy shortly before her death, "is what God has given us for a
cross." 16

[17]
Attenborough's Shadowlands
reminds us that all thinkers long to make sense of
life, arriving at perfect answers to life's
questions, but that even the greatest intellects have met with defeat. The complexities of pain and suffering are perhaps best approached
by contemplating Attenborough's
Lewis's final words on the
subject: "The pain now is part of the happiness then." Attenborough's film
reminds all Christians that the pain we confront while living in the
shadowlands will - one day - serve to intensify the joy of a shadowless
heaven.